Video: Exploring Maps in Google Wave

Google Maps has been powerfully integrated into Google Wave. Like everything else in Wave, maps can be edited and manipulated in real time and all other members of the wave will be able to see your changes instantaneously. Thus, the Maps gadget in Wave is useful for, again, collaboration; this time, you can share locations, routes, and points of interests, all inside the beautiful Google Maps interface. Watch the video below for a brief, complete rundown of the Maps gadget.

Google Wave acquires AppJet

AppJet, the company and creators of EtherPad, an online collaborative word processor, has just been bought by Google Wave. As announced on the EtherPad blog, the EtherPad team will continue it’s work, but with Google Wave.

A Google spokesperson says in an email:

AppJet is a team of highly-talented entrepreneurs with deep expertise in real-time web collaboration. Google and AppJet have a shared vision of how web collaboration can benefit users, and we’re excited to have the AppJet team contribute to the success of Google Wave.

How to Use “Aunt Rosie” the Google Wave Translation Bot

Google Wave largely appeals as a collaboration tool. This is really helpful for businesses and organizations who need to brainstorm, communicate, and bounce ideas off of each other in real-time. Thankfully, Google Wave promises to have a variety of tools available to make collaborating as easy and natural as possible.

One of these tools is “Aunt Rosie” the translation robot. Aunt Rosie gives you the ability to communicate with someone who might even speak a different language than you. Whatever you type is translated into the language of your choice. Here’s how you can do it.

How to Create a Public Wave in Google Wave

As a new waver, one of the first things you might have done was search for public waves to join in and participate. A public wave is a wave that is open for anyone to join. Some are dedicated to listing your favorite recipes, others in order to play a public game of Sudoku and then others are created for intense philosophical and theological debate.

You too can create a public wave for people to join in on. It’s really easy to create your own public wave.

5 Things to Do When You First Get Google Wave

If you are lucky enough to get an invitation to Google Wave, you are probably pretty excited to get such a sought after prize, but now that you are logged in to Wave, what do you do now?

At a first glance in Google Wave, you’ll notice there is a navigation box in the top left corner of the interface, a contacts list in the bottom left of the interface, a listing of waves in the middle of the interface, and to the very right of the interface, waves are displayed.

Make Your First Wave

If you click the “New Wave” button at the top of the middle column, a new wave will appear in the right column. At the top of the wave, there is a “+” sign right by your name. If you click this, you can add more participants to the wave.

In the wave, you can add rich-text, pictures, maps, and other media. You might want to learn some helpful hotkeys and keyboard shortcuts too.

Gmail Creator Finally Tries Google Wave. Integrating Gmail with Wave?

Paul Bucheit, the creator of Gmail and co-founder of FriendFeed commented on Wave killing email and said, “Email is not going to disappear. Possibly ever. Until the robots kill us all.” When asked for further comments regarding Wave, he noted that he hadn’t actually tried Wave yet.

Well, he finally did. And didn’t change his opinion.

Why is Google Wave So Hard to Understand?

Google Wave is a pretty new idea that seemingly changes the way people communicate. Despite this massive change in the way people communicate, “waving” your friends hasn’t spread like wildfire just quite yet. This could be for a number of reasons: Google’s somewhat closed “invitation system”, the lack of publicity surrounding Google Wave, or because people just don’t want to change and would rather stick with their email inbox instead of their Wave inbox. In sum, Google Wave still has a lot of people stumped.

Google Wave Hotkeys & Keyboard Shortcuts

Hotkeys or keyboard shortcuts perform certain functions within Google Wave so you don’t have to take your hands off of the keyboard. These can really help speed up the way you work in Wave.

Here are some simple hotkeys and keyboard shortcuts that I’ve found very helpful as I’ve worked in Google Wave. You’ll want to use these.

Navigation Shortcuts

Up/Down Arrows – scroll through messages in a wave

Home – takes you to the first message in a wave

How to Add Twitter to Google Wave

You can even integrate your Twitter account into Google Wave by using a Twitter extension. It’s really easy. Here’s how.

First, you’ll need to add tweety-wave@appspot.com to your contacts.

Secondly, you’ll need to create a new wave and add Tweety to the wave. When you do this, you’ll want to make sure that your pop-up blocker is turned off because the Tweety extension will be added to the wave and a window will pop-up asking you for your Twitter login details.

What is Google Wave?

In the 1960s, one of the first emails was sent and received. This method of communication drastically changed the way we communicate. However, since then, email has stayed relatively the same.

Fast forward more than 40 years later and meet Google Wave. The team behind Google Wave describes it as “what email would look like if it were invented today.” Unlike email, users are able to communicate and collaborate with one another in real-time with text, photos, videos, and much more.

But what does this all even really mean?

Meeting Google Wave For the First Time

When you send an email to someone and they respond back to you, multiple copies of the email are sent, stored, and received. If you continue this conversation, the copies of this email quickly accumulate in your and the other person’s inbox and other folders. Google Wave’s solution is too eliminate multiple copies of a conversation into one live document known as a “wave.”